The Latest News

Greetings to all! Hope all is well, and that those reading from the North are enjoying a good summer.

To the left is an image from my “morning commute”. I am working with four primary schools on Environmental Education—one is here in town but the other three are a good forty five minute bike ride up a mountainous gravel road. It is frequently clear early in the morning when I am headed out, so I am rewarded with spectacular views, an advantage of life at high altitude.

I am sitting in my room in Ixtahuacán writing this entry on my new computer. While I could do my job without it, I decided I would be more effective and professional with a computer, so I bought one and had a friend bring it down from the States. Peace Corps is not what it was in the Sixties—or the Nineties, for that matter. I need a cell phone and the Internet in order to do my job. Volunteers today are generally somewhat connected with friends and family back home in the States. On the other hand, some things don’t change. Some of my students have no shoes. I am served coffee in dirt-floored huts. There is no indoor plumbing. I no longer take notice of such things, but if I think about it I can see the web of a thousand details that make my life entirely different here than it ever was in North America.

As I type my ‘host mother’, Martina, is in the house out back, in labor. It will be her fifth child. I am excited to have a baby in the house. It may sound like a lot of kids, but the Mayans are scaling down the size of their families. Martina herself is one of thirteen children. I’ll get a photo of the little whippersnapper up here as soon as possible.

Rosa is making tortillas with her daughter Pascuala, grandson Dylan riding high. This is how Mayan women carry babies.

Here is my house. It was built by international NGOs in 1999 along with the rest of the town, and you can see their seal by the door. It’s cozy. There is electricity but no indoor plumbing, though the pila (a big concrete sink) is right out back in the patio. I have a little gas stove and a toaster oven in my room, so I can cook tasty food.